6

succeed, by open force, Ali now resorted to fraud. He made peace with the Suliotes, and as M. Pouqueville himself characterizes his favorite people, as avaricious rather of money than glory,' he found no difficulty in engaging a band of their warriors to enter into his service, in a pretended expedition against the Bey of Argyro-Castro. Scarcely had the combined force of Albanians and Suliotes undertaken this march, when the latter were surrounded, and disarmed, and made prisoners by the Albanians. Ali now proposed to Tzavellas, the chief of the Suliote confederacy, to persuade his countrymen to submit themselves. Tzavellas, making an evasive answer, was sent home by Ali to consult his countrymen, leaving his troops and his son among them as prisoners. and hostages. Arrived among his fellow citizens, he wrote a letter of defiance to Ali, of which M. Pouqueville has given us a copy. It is for the reader to judge of the probable authenticity of such a document. It is not the least suspicious circumstance about it, that it consists of idle and insulting generalities, which no sensible chieftain, who has great affairs in his hands, troubles himself to write. What followed after this attempt, M. Pouqueville does not inform us, except by saying in a note, that the valor and audacity of Tzavellas and his wife obliged Ali Pacha, after three years of combats and reprisals, to restore to them their son, and the other prisoners." We infer from this, that the war continued with various success for three years longer, and that a pacification then ensued by the submission of the Suliotes. It is certainly somewhat to the credit of Ali Pacha, regarded as a Turkish governor waging war against rebellious christian subjects, that young Tzavellas and his fellow christians, after passing three years in Ali's dungeons, wore their heads home.

While these events were transpiring in the interior of his domain, Ali was employed, as the Consul informs us, in tampering with a foreign power, (what power he makes a matter of mock secresy,) to aid him in setting up as an independent prince in Greece. A traitorous correspondence containing these proposals was intercepted by the Porte, and a Capidgi Bachi sent down with it to Yanina, to investigate its authenticity. Ali, according to the Consul, induced a wretched Greek, by mingled promises and threats, to confess, that he forged the correspondence. The Greek of course was hung

on the spot, and Ali's loyalty redeemed from suspicion. Allthis seems to us insipid and unlikely.* No names, dates, coincidences, or arguments are given, and we do not believe that Ali ever conceived the project of avowedly throwing off his dependence on the Porte.

The succeeding two years, up to the summer of 1797, were occupied by Ali in a war on a revolted Bey of Upper Albania, to which he marched by command of the Porte, and in which he made some accessions to his domains. The names of the persons and places mentioned in the accounts of these transactions are of too little notoriety to be repeated. An event of greater importance was the revolt of Passevend Oglou, Pacha of Widin, a frontier post on the Austrian side of Roumelia, one of the boldest and ablest of the Turkish governors of the last century. This revolt took place in the summer of 1797, when the French, by the treaty of Campo Formio, became masters of the Ionian Isles, and of the continental possessions of the Venetians in Greece, Prevesa, Parga, Vonizza and Bucintro. Ali Pacha, according to M. Pouqueville, succeeded in making Gentili, the French commandant of the Ionian Isles, subservient to his policy. He welcomed the tricolored flag, sent to Yanina on a message of fraternity by the French general, and wrote a letter to Bonaparte, which was published in the journals of the day. The return for this cajolery was, that Ali Pacha received from the French government leave to fit out an expedition by sea against two powerful Albanian cantons on the coast; an attempt he had never been able to make before, because the Venetians regarded the strait between Corfu and Albania, in the same light as the emperor of Russia does the Pacific ocean; viz. as a close sea. Ali received the French general's permission to navigate this close sea with his galleys, fell upon the inhabitants, who were engaged in the festivities of Easter, in the spring of 1798, and killed 6000; a considerable number to be massacred without resistance, by a marauding band; but the French Consul, like the painter in the Vicar of Wakefield, with his diamonds, is never niggardly with his killed and wounded. The most vexatious thing in his account is,

* That all which Pouqueville gives as the language used by Ali in private, to persuade the Greek, must be imaginary and without authority, needs not be said.

that he does not state the semblance of a provocation, on the part of these unfortunate cantons, belonging to another pachalic, and separated from that of Ali by impassable mountains, which made all access to them by land impossible ;Quodcunque ostendis mihi sic incredulus odi.

His success on this occasion, however, raised Ali in the estimation of all good mussulmans, and procured him a brevet of Aslan, the Lion, with which he marched out, at the command of the Porte, and at the head of 8000 men, against the formidable rebel Passevend Oglou.

Forty pachas of Asia and Europe, with their feudatory powers, were in arms before the gates of Widin, when Ali Pacha appeared among them. At this moment, the intelligence reached the army, that the French had landed in Egypt. This invasion of the Grand Seignor's territory led of course to an open rupture between the Porte and the French government. As the latter, by the possession of the Venetian forts on the Grecian continent, was the frontier neighbor of Ali, he immediately received orders to leave Widin, and repair to the defence of his own territory. Arrived at Yanina, he was able to lull the suspicions of General Gentili, who, for a French commander of a very important frontier station, appears to have been a credulous gentleman. Ali made him believe, that he was only raising troops and strengthening his army, by way of maintaining an armed neutrality between the Porte and France. Under this delusion the crafty Pacha enticed the French general Rose, commandant of Bucintro, to a parley at Philates, where he seized him and sent him a prisoner to Constantinople. At the same moment, he fell upon the French posts at Bucintro, Prevesa, and Vonitza, massacred or made prisoners their garrisons, and was only prevented from seizing Parga, by the appearance of a Russian fleet, which took possession of it for the Emperor Paul, at that time the august ally of the Grand Turk. Some of these movements are familiar to all our readers, who have been taught by Lord Byron's muse to

'Remember the moment when Prevesa fell,'

and who may be gratified at being able, from the foregoing account, to place that event where it belongs in the order of history. As a recompense for his achievement, Ali now New Series, No. 17.

16

received from the Porte, the third horsetail, and the title of vizier, which goes with it. Lord Nelson, at that time cruising in the neighborhood, sent an officer to compliment him on the capture of Prevesa, and to apologize that his lordship did not make a visit in person to the hero of Epirus.'

Ali passed the winter of 1798, in preparing the farther subjection of the Suliotes, by a new expedition against them. The French Consul does not inform us in what manner they had passed the time since the last pacification in 1795, nor what circumstances of provocation, or whether any, excited Ali to a new assault upon them. We think it not unlikely, that they had allowed themselves to be tampered with by the French, from the Ionian Islands. The Pacha took the field at the head of ten thousand troops. As he had concealed his designs till the last moment, the Suliotes were taken by surprise, and especially when they saw Bozzari, their ablest chieftain, at the head of seventy men, desert to the ranks of the vizier. This name of Bozzari appears in the very last accounts, which, at the time of writing, we have received from the patriots in Greece; and proves that the valor of the father has descended to the son. Notwithstanding the overwhelming force with which they were invaded, and this defection of their leader, the Suliotes nevertheless determined on resistance. On an accurate enumeration of their bands, they were found to amount to fifteen hundred armed warriors, under the command of thirty one partizan chiefs. Collecting all the stores and munitions within their reach, they retired with this force to the mountains. The army of Ali moved forward to an assault, but being repulsed with the loss of three hundred and seventy killed and many wounded, the vizier determined to draw a cordon round the heights of Suli, and starve its citizens into submission. This plan accordingly went into operation. At the end of nine months, the Suliotes began to suffer from famine. They succeeded, however, in sending two hundred of of their old men, women, and children, to the Ionian Isles, then fallen into the hands of the Russians, by whom the fugitives were kindly received. At the end of three months more of additional sufferings, a party of four hundred men and seventy women, were able in a dark night to force their way to Parga, and return with provisions to their mountains. Parga is twenty miles from Suli, reckoning the French lieue at two

and half miles. A march of forty miles through hostile hosts, in one night, for four hundred and seventy men and women, with delay sufficient to load with provisions, and carry them home on the back, is rather hard of digestion; but we have no right to contradict it. The exploit certainly surpasses that of the Spartans, who in three days marched one hundred and twenty miles to the aid of the Athenians at Marathon.

Ali, suspecting some treachery at this prolonged resistance of the Suliotes, thought proper to hang a few of his own captains, a circumstance, which, with the tediousness of the service, so discouraged the rest, that they broke up in disgust from their encampment and went home. The French Consul even avers, that they entered into a league with the Suliotes against the vizier. Of this, however, there are no proofs in his narrative, and in the spring of 1802, Ali was again early employed in measures to reduce these troublesome mountaineers. The Pacha of Adrianople, for what imaginable reason we are not told, took umbrage at these proceedings of Ali; and the latter was obliged to detach a part of his force under his oldest son Muctar, lately made Pacha of Lepanto, and now despatched by his father to hold the Pacha. of Adrianople in check. This campaign was of short duration, and Muctar soon returned with his troops to enforce the siege, in which the Suliotes were held in their mountains. Veli Bey, the second son of Ali, was also sent by his father to the army, and the war was pushed with such vigor, that the Suliotes had soon no resource for water, but to let down from the inaccessible cliffs where they were nested, sponges loaded with lead into the Acheron, (which river the Consul identifies with that which flows through this region,) from which they thus drew up a scanty relief of their thirst.

At this moment, Emineh, the wife of the vizier, and mother of Muctar and Veli, fearing for the fate of her sons thus engaged with a desperate enemy, and, according to M. Pouqueville, moved with pity for the Suliotes themselves, undertook, in a moment of confidence, to remonstrate with her husband, and to plead for the Suliotes, about to become his victims. The vizier, enraged at her expostulations, seized a pistol and fired at a venture. The aim missed, but Emineh fell senseless in a swoon, and died before morning. M. Pouqueville gives us, at the length of an octavo page, the address